UFO Expert Comes To Brevard
Source: Florida Today
By Billy Cox
Florida Today  - Oct 14, 1:58 PM

George W. Bush raised a few eyebrows during the 2000 presidential campaign when
he responded to a question about releasing government files on unidentified
flying objects.  "It�ll be the first thing he (Dick Cheney) will do," Bush said.
"He�ll get right on it."

Immediately upon assuming office, however, the Bush administration exhibited an
impulse for even tighter controls on government information, long before the
9/11 security clampdown.  From Bush�s immediate suspension of the 1978
Presidential Records Act to Cheney�s refusal to comply with a General Accounting
Office request for the names of the Vice President�s Energy Task Force members,
patterns of concealment are consistent. Just last month, Bush signed Executive
Order 12958, which gave the director of the Office of Science and Technology
Policy the unprecedented authority to declare information "Top Secret."

"They didn�t explain a rationale for it," says Steven Aftergood, director of the
Federation of American Scientists� government secrecy project in Washington,
D.C. "The only way to know for sure how significant it is, is to come back a
year from now and see how many times it�s been exercised."

UFO declassification proponents thought they were building momentum for
congressional hearings with a forum of witnesses in May 2001 announcing their
willingness to testify. Then, the roof fell in. "The Saudi Arabian flying circus
came to town, and the U.S. declared an open-ended war against this term, this
noun, called terror," recalls lobbyist Stephen Bassett. "All the attention and
all the headlines got sucked up by 9/11, and all the political work went into
suspended animation."

But UFO reports never stopped. Nor did calls for government accountability.
Friday, one of the leading advocates�Stanton Friedman�will discuss what he calls
the "Cosmic Watergate" at Brevard Community College�s Titusville campus.

Author of "Crash at Corona" and "Top Secret/Majic," Friedman was among the first
to revisit the 1947 Roswell Incident, in which military authorities initially
announced the recovery of a flying saucer, only to reverse themselves amid the
ensuing media clamor. But from his home in New Brunswick, Canada, the
American-born researcher blames contemporary media passivity for enabling a
cover-up.

"The only way we�ll make any progress with this issue is when the press gets off
its duff and takes a serious look at all the documents that have been in the
public domain for years," says Friedman. His background in nuclear physics
landed him 14 years� worth of work on nuclear rockets, much of it classified.
"I�d like to see them spend just 10 percent of the energy they invested in
covering Gary Condit, Elian Gonzales and Monica Lewinsky."

Friedman contends government documents already in the public domain are loaded
with smoking guns, not the least of which is the famous Bolender Memo. In 1969,
just as the Air Force was terminating its public investigation of UFOs called
Project Blue Book based on their negligible impact on national security, Brig.
Gen. C.H. Bolender, deputy director of development for the USAF chief of staff,
illuminated a backdoor policy: "Reports of unidentified flying objects which
could affect national security. . . . are not part of the Blue Book system."

"The media needs a commitment to the truth and to ignore the crap," says
Friedman. "There was a conference in Chicago in 1997, on the 50th anniversary of
Roswell, and one guy shows up wearing alien antennae on his head. CBS was
covering the event and�wouldn�t you know it? -- the guy with the headgear is the
one who makes the news that night. This is typical."

Next April, during the presidential primary campaigns, Friedman and a host of
investigators will join Bassett, founder of X-PPAC, the Extraterrestrial
Phenomenon Political Action Committee, in Washington for yet another effort to
forge UFOs into political dialogue. Bassett was on hand in 2001 when an
initiative called the Disclosure Project pressed for immunity for whistleblowers
whose testimony would violate their security oaths.

Among the most impressive insiders assembled by the Disclosure Project was a
retired USAF captain who�supported by Strategic Air Command documents�was in a
Wyoming ICBM silo in 1967 when a UFO drained the power from launch complexes
housing 10 nuclear-tipped warheads. Another was a Federal Aviation
Administration accidents division chief who, despite being told by a CIA agent
to keep a lid on it, presented a box full of records concerning a harrowing,
30-minute encounter involving a UFO and a Japanese airliner off Alaska in 1986.

Although the Bush presidency apparently has no intention of addressing UFOs, its
attitude is part of a bipartisan continuum by chief executives to avoid the
issue. Jimmy Carter, for instance, filed a report of his own UFO sighting with
the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and promised an open
investigation during his 1976 campaign. But as president, Carter never followed
through. Bill Clinton, according to the memoirs of former deputy Attorney
General Webster Hubbell, directed him to get to the bottom of UFOs.  Hubbell
failed.

Repeated efforts by Florida Today to interview both Democrats about UFOs have
been unsuccessful.

Last year, former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta announced his partnership
with the Coalition for Freedom of Information� funded by the Sci Fi Channel, a
client of his PodestaMattoon law firm�to try to end UFO gridlock. For CFI
research advisor Ted Roe, the issue is compelling, but so delicate he refers to
the mystery in broader terms: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAEs.

Roe is the executive director of the National Aviation Reporting Center on
Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) in Vallejo, Calif. In order to improve flight
safety, NARCAP, a private outfit, collects data on everything from ball
lightning to plasma disturbances, as reported by pilots, radar operators and air
traffic controllers. But getting these sources to cooperate is dicey, due to the
exotic nature of many UAEs.

"The really strange ones involve cylinders, discs, spheres, red lights and white
lights, V-shaped or boomerang-shaped objects.  Some of them are huge," says Roe,
whose colleague, Dr. Richard Haines, authored a controversial report in 2000
analyzing more than 100 incidents, entitled "Aviation Safety in America."

"Some of them seem to demonstrate an alteration of magnetic fields, which can
cause compasses to turn up to 20 degrees off direction. They can have transient
or permanent effects on avionics systems, such as shutting off transmitters."

In early September 2001, NARCAP sent survey questionnaires on UAEs to 300 pilots
of a major airline carrier. "We couldn�t have picked a worse week," says Roe.
"Two days later, the (World Trade Center) towers fell." Still, NARCAP got a 24
percent response, with one of every six subjects reporting having seen something
so bizarre they couldn�t identify it. "But not a one of them reported it to
management," Roe adds.

Roe says retirees are more likely to talk than active pilots, which isn�t a
surprise. "The airline facilitator who was trying to promote our survey wound up
getting two psychiatric evaluations," he says. "There are 500,000 people in our
target culture, the aviation community, who are very interested in this subject.
But these experiences become toxic when they manifest into (pilots�)
environment."

Only constant media pressure, says Friedman, will force authorities to respond
to public curiosity. After all, 72 percent of Americans responding to a Roper
Poll conducted last year believes the government isn�t telling everything it
knows about UFOs.

"I read that with Watergate, the Washington Post had something like 16 people
working that story at one time," says Friedman, who�ll also be signing copies of
his work at Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Merritt Island on 7 p.m. Thursday.
"It�s going to require that sort of effort. You can have all the seminars and
lectures in the world, but if the press doesn�t come and follow it up, then you
haven�t had much of an impact."

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